Silent Hill: Sketches in Blood
by superslacker
Summary: The town of Silent Hill returns to consume all that you know and love. Note: fourth and final chapter should be up, short, I know. Plz R
1. The Beginning

Disclaimer: I do not in any way own or represent the Silent Hill games, Konami, George Washington University, or any part of the Federal Government.  
  
"My Joshy is a special little boy," Beatrice Manheim would use to say. "He has the most wonderful imagination." Joshua Manheim was indeed a "special" little boy, and, as his mother stated, he did have quite the imagination. He was an extremely intelligent lad as well, with a knack for drawing. Needless to say, his drawings were always on his mother's refrigerator. His older brother John was no less intelligent, but he wasn't a dreamer like Josh. He was looking forward to his last year of high school, getting accepted to George Washington University, and landing a nice job at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, perfectly content to file away numbers in exchange for a salary and connections. Who knows, one day he might be a politician, but for now he needed to be realistic—and stable.  
  
Beatrice, Joshua, and John formed the last surviving members of the Manheim family after a horrific series of events led to the death of all the other relatives. Train wrecks, plane crashes, automobile accidents, cancer; all of these seemed to plague the family. While Beatrice was not normally a superstitious woman, she quietly wondered if she had not been devout enough, and subsequently slipped a few more dollars into the collection plate each Sunday. Nevertheless, she managed to keep the family together and cheerful, and everything seemed to be going well. She had smart, healthy young men with bright futures, and runoff from wills and life insurance kept them comfortably middle-class while allowing her to stay home. Life was relatively good.  
  
Then Joshua disappeared.  
  
His mother was shocked, as was his brother. They had been noticing changes in Josh recently; he had lost all interest in his friends, his school, food, everything. Except the drawings. He worked with a possessed, feverish intensity on his drawings now. Before, his drawings had been simple, standard 9-year-old fare: people he knew, people playing sports, idyllic landscapes, along with a dose of the whimsical surreal, all done with a good amount of talent. Now, the drawings became more and more disturbing: people with exaggerated faces, screaming as blood poured out of their eyes; mangled body parts stitched together, slowly approaching; ravenous dogs with no skin.  
  
Beatrice wondered inwardly if this was some kind of subconscious release of the trauma he experienced in the accidents that killed his family, or maybe he was sick, or maybe it was part of growing up, though she never remembered John doing anything like this.  
  
John, also, wondered if this had to do with the death of the family. It had been hard for him; Josh was close with his father. But he couldn't fathom how the images could relate to the accidents. He had taken a Psychology class sophomore year, and decided to apply what he had learned to Josh. "Josh?" Silence. "Hey buddy, what's up?" Again, silence. Only the scribbling of a red crayon could be heard. "Listen man, Mom and I are worried about you. You won't talk, you won't eat, all you do is draw these pictures." Silence. John picked up a recent drawing. It showed a man being dissolved in a sticky substance, presumably acidic. "What is this one about?" Silence. "...is it Dad?"  
  
Joshua slowly looked up from the paper. His skin was waxen and pale, his face gaunt from lack of food. His eyes seemed enormous as they slowly focused on John's. Suddenly, John felt a tremendous sense of fear, no, not even that—human beings can attempt to reason with themselves and dissipate the fear. This... this was an animalistic, mind-consuming sense of paranoia. He convulsed and nearly fell off his chair.  
  
"J-Josh, wha..." Joshua slowly held up the drawing he had just finished. John couldn't understand; it looked like a mass of scribbles. "What is it, Joshua?" Joshua began to scream. "GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!" John gladly obeyed. This was two nights before he disappeared.  
  
Later that morning, after the police had filed their report, John wandered into his little brother's room, hoping to find something they had missed. He looked under Josh's bed. Nothing. He leafed through the drawings. The same psychotic images. He flipped to the last one—the scribbles from two nights prior.  
  
He stared at it. The scribbles seemed to draw in all of his senses. It seemed that the scribbles unlocked something in John's brain. Suddenly, he could see, smell, taste, hear, feel, and another sense there is no word for, EVERYTHING. He could taste his mother crying in the next room. He could see the inside of the floor beneath him. He could hear the ants outside screaming. As he focused more on the drawing, the scribbles seemed to undo themselves, like watching a video of them being drawn in reverse. John's head began to pulse. His eye twitched involuntarily. The same feeling of animalistic fear from the first time he saw this drawing knotted his gut.  
  
Then, the scribbles stopped.  
  
His senses returned to their normal proportion, and his fear melted away. On the paper was left the drawing of a single hill, containing a man's head whose mouth was stitched shut. John stood slowly, with the paper in his hands, and walked out the door. His mother was crying in the armchair. He approached her with the drawing.  
  
"Mom?" "What, John?" "Take a look at this..." He handed her the picture. She studied it briefly, and then a light of comprehension dawned on her face to be immediately conquered by a contortion of fear.  
  
"NO! NO! NO! NO!" "MOM! What? What's wrong!?" "NO! NOT THIS! DAMN YOU, DAMN HIM, AND DAMN THAT TOWN!"  
  
John looked on in shock. His mother had apparently lost her mind. He snatched the picture away and held his mother firmly, softly calming her with his voice. She collapsed into tears. "Mom, what does this mean?" She looked at him for what seemed like an eternity. Then she quietly began.  
  
"Your father and I grew up together, and when we got married, he wanted to go to the town of Silent Hill for our honeymoon. Back then it was a resort town, nice and picturesque. Then, when we reaffirmed our vows, we decided to have a second honeymoon, and made plans to go back. All of our calls to all the people there went unanswered, though. We figured it was coincidence, and packed up and headed there anyways. When we got there, the road was blocked, and... and... the bodies..." She sniffed and looked into the distance. Josh was confounded.  
  
Beatrice looked slowly into his eyes. "I'm old, John. You're all I've got left. Please... stay safe..."  
  
For some reason, John was filled with rage. "You're acting like he's already dead! I mean, aren't you going to tell the cops? This is a major lead! Time is running out!" His mother simply looked at him.  
  
"If he's there, he's already dead."  
  
John was out the door and halfway to his car before his mother could get out of the chair.  
  
John drove slowly through the fog. His eyes were bloodshot as they scanned the desolate highway. He had driven the better part of two days, searching for the town of Silent Hill, and finally he had found it. It was silent indeed... and what was this fog? His halogen lights, even on high, barely cut ten feet through the fog. As his mother had remembered, the road was blocked. There were cars strewn about the roads, rusted and decrepit. He stopped at the rest area before the blocked tunnel. It was filthy and didn't look like it had been cleaned this decade. He looked at his reflection. His face was haggard from lack of sleep. A five o' clock shadow framed his sunken eyes. He looked around the bathrooms and decided there was nothing there for him. As he exited the bathroom, he heard an odd clacking noise, like an anatomy class skeleton being shaken.  
  
John remembered what his mother had said before he left, most vividly the last words: "the bodies". What that was referring to, he had no idea. A form appeared from the mists. He squinted and waved. "Hello? Is someone there?" A throaty moan emanated from the figure as it staggered forward. John let out a gasp. The figure was humanoid, but... not. It was decayed, much like the bathroom. Was this some kind of sleep-deprived illusion? "Who... what... I... AGGHH!" he screamed as the monster leaned back and sprayed a burning substance at him. Temporarily blinded, he rushed forward and knocked the thing over, and proceeded to kick it. After a while, he cleared his eyes, and looked at his assailant. It was... zombielike, there was no other word for it. It was also very dead. Was this what his mother referred to?  
  
He wandered down the only path he could find, skirting around the road and through the forest. Odd noises followed him wherever he went. He felt the stirrings of paranoia within him. He couldn't see anything through the fog. John began to run. The noises got louder. He ran faster and faster, the blood pounding through his head. His fear was consuming him, as he ran faster, faster. He smacked into a gate, tore it open, and dashed inside.  
  
Into the graveyard. 


	2. The Glutton and Clockwork

John stumbled, bleeding, into the graveyard. He had become immune to the innate human fear of them since the accidents that befell his family, but after what he had just seen, he didn't know what to expect. He wandered around, hitting his shins repeatedly on the ruins of headstones. He couldn't see anything through the fog, his shins hurt, he was cold, and hungry, and scared, but most of all alone.  
  
For the first time since he was thirteen, John began to cry. He sat down amid the gravestones as his face contorted itself into a grimace of sorrow, and sobbed for the better part of twenty minutes. Afterwards, he stood, composed himself, and began to walk. He didn't care where he was going, he figured he'd eventually find a wall and follow it. He was just becoming used to the complete lack of anything in the fog, when there loomed the shadow of a massive building. He paused, scanning the doorframe for any clue to what lay inside. It was apparently a church. "Churches are sanctuaries, right? I could use some God time right about now," he thought.  
  
The door creaked as he swung it open. Inside, there were several rows of pews, with debris blocking most of the aisles. As he approached the altar, John became aware of a growing sense of unease. Something wasn't right. When he emerged from the maze of debris and pews, his senses were confirmed; he was standing in a slowly, slowly spreading pool of blood emanating from the altar. Nothing in his young life had ever prepared him for this sacrilege. Sure, he'd read about crazy cults out on the West Coast, or in the deep South, and he'd seen a lot of horror flicks, but this...  
  
Something caught his eye on the altar, however. Biting back his distaste, he gingerly stepped through the blood to the center of the room. A faint noise was emanating from—he picked up the small object and wiped away the blood—a... radio? It looked like it had been used in WWII, and was working about as well. A few tinges of static, but nothing else.  
  
The soft sound of a child's laughter pealed out from the balcony. He turned, startled. "Hello?" His voice echoed throughout the hall. The echo of a woman's scream rang out. "HELLO!? Is anyone there?!" he yelled. He turned and hurdled over the pews and sprinted to the staircase at the back of the sanctuary. John flew up two at a time, and paused at the top. Nothing. Cautiously, he began to silently pad down the hallway. The rooms were cluttered with broken chairs and tables, and a dark red liquid he presumed to be blood, mixed with an unnatural amount of rust and decay.  
  
As he scanned room after room, progressing down the hall, he didn't notice the slowly waning light until he realized he couldn't see his feet below him. John looked back. The last visible edge of light had vanished at least twenty feet behind. He turned to start back, when he heard a heavy stumping. He froze. The sound was getting nearer. As John began to edge towards the light, he froze again. There, emerging into the hallway, was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen.  
  
It was a massive, nightmarish creature that didn't seem... possible. A grotesque wad of flesh, heaving its way through the hall, it looked as if it was turned inside out and John could clearly see what looked like frantically clawing arms and appendages trying to rip their way out of its side, but to no avail. It twisted and contorted in ways that seemed to defy both physics and plausible anatomy. What scared John most, however, was the hole. A gaping maw, it gnashed its gums and secreted quarts of whatever it used for saliva. It consumed everything in its path; chairs, tables, debris, all were absorbed with a sickening sucking sound. John bolted into the room nearest him, shut and latched the door.  
  
Mistake.  
  
In actuality, John had been completely hidden in the shadow of the hallway, and due to his freezing response, silent as well. The thing had no idea he was there until he moved and loudly slammed the door.  
  
John began to breathe again as he slammed the door and heard the satisfying thunk of the deadbolt. This is how it happens in the movies, right? The monster tries in vain to open the door, while the protagonist has a chance to catch his breath and regroup. John wearily got to his feet and began to examine the room.  
  
Trouble is, this wasn't the movies.  
  
As soon as John took his first two steps into the middle of the room, the creature plowed through the doorway and buried its massive hole into where he had been sitting two seconds prior. His brain pounded with adrenaline. In the space of a second, he looked around the room, saw a window, and crashed through, though to him it seemed an eternity. Amidst the shards of slowly flying glass, his adrenaline-soaked brain had time to notice a crude drawing of what he had just seen flutter out of the window beside him before he plunged fifteen feet to the ground at normal speed.  
  
And John did walk in the valley of the shadow of death, but lo; he was not shopping for real estate.  
  
He woke with a start, but immediately regretted it. He winced as he slowly became aware of his body and surroundings. John had, in fact, cracked a rib in the fall, not to mention scraped off a good deal of his left cheek and had landed in glass shards. He wasn't dead, but looked and felt it. He slowly pulled himself to his feet, surveying the surroundings of his fall, and grimacing with pain as he removed glass shards from his back and arms. As he brushed himself off, he spotted the paper that had accompanied him on his little fall. John picked it up and examined it. On the stained paper, a crude scribble of what he had just seen was drawn in the most startlingly realistic blood red he had ever seen. He turned it over, and was rewarded with this:  
  
JOHN yOu ARE Not WELComE HErE GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY I'LL KILL YOU KILL YOU KILL YOU DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE ruN AwAY RUN AWAY RUN AwAY RUN AWAY!!!!  
  
"Josh? Did you write this? What in the hell..." he muttered. If he had, his brother was spending the rest of his life hugging himself in a rubber room. John turned and looked at the window he had just plummeted out of. The gaping hole glared back down at him. "Seems an improvement... fits the rest of the décor, anyway," he thought. He examined this side of the church. He knew he had distinctly heard a child laughing and a woman scream before, at the altar. What if they were still in there with that thing?  
  
His consciousness was suddenly jerked back down to the paper in his hands. Down in the corner of the back side of the page, there was a mass of scribbles he hadn't noticed before. The same paranoia began to assail his sanity, and his senses expanded again. The scribbles started to undo themselves slowly, but John was a little more ready this time. He tried to focus, through his expanded senses, on the church. A new wave of even greater fear washed through him, but in his panic John was able to focus. He got a whiff of a woman's hair... basement, closet... he tasted... tears?  
  
The scribbles ended, along with his extrasensory abilities and the animalistic fear. As he examined the message, his hands shook and his heart raced. His mind had cut through the paranoia, but his body had not. John was grateful he had not wet himself. The message revealed was a simple one.  
  
i'm sorry, run fast now john  
  
He arched his eyebrow, then looked up in time to see a single shadow on the top of the church stagger forward and fall. As the figure approached the ground, the radio quietly began emitting static. John didn't notice; he walked forward towards the impact site.  
  
It was a single, man-sized form, a little on the short side. An odd clicking noise, like a clock, began to emanate from the radio. As John came up upon it, lightening suddenly flashed somewhere from the foggy sky, illuminating the figure. He froze. Before him was yet another grotesque, disturbing amalgamation of flesh... except this time much worse. It was a machine, a... robot? With flesh haphazardly sewn over the arms and torso... or was the machinery randomly replacing organic parts?  
  
John inched closer, and immediately regretted doing so: his foot nudged a rock down the slight crater the clockwork monster had made, smacking into its head. The clicking noise got louder, and suddenly the arms and legs began thrashing wildly, and the head began ratcheting around in circles. John stepped back, but curiosity overtook him when the monster suddenly froze. He inched forward again, and this time, the clockwork abomination began to ratchet up into a sitting position. A hideous voice whispered in John's head: "I thought I told you to run." He backed up as the beast stood. Its hands had been replaced with ridiculously large blades.  
  
John ran. The clockwork man followed. 


	3. Twisted Corridors of the Shadow Id

As John pounded up the forest path, he was all too aware of the thing he had named Clockwork gaining behind him. It seemed like every tic of the mechanical monstrosity had become in synch with his steps, mimicking him—and catching up. He sprinted past the "Silent Hill Ranch", past the hills, past a construction site, and through a tunnel. He threw open a chain-link gate, slammed it behind him, and continued running until he ran headlong into a newspaper dispenser, flipping him over onto his bloodied back and cracked rib. A fire lit itself behind his eyes and napalm flooded his lungs, and the world went black.  
  
When he came to, John was still lying awkwardly next to the auto vendor, and the pain had dissipated, but not much. He slowly got to his feet. Clockwork was nowhere to be seen, and neither was The Glutton. Safe, for the moment. He staggered a few steps, then steadied himself and began to follow the road. The fog was worse than ever, and a chilling wind began to blow through. His hoodie, normally thick and comfortable, was torn in many places and soaked with blood. Not knowing what to do next, he slowly made his way to the first building he saw: some kind of gardening or flower shop. He peered inside, hoping to whatever gods were listening that there was another person there, or at least was empty. His wish was heard.  
  
John tried the door. No luck, but there was a large window in the door. Wrapping what little was left of his sleeve around his fist and forearm, he punched in the window and unlocked the door. Once inside, he began poking around. Nothing much in the way of clothing... or food. "Useless," he thought, but then he remembered: there are things outside that wanted to kill him. He quickly made his way to the back of the store, where the hardware was kept. John cackled with glee as he quickly located the most badass weapon available: a massive chainsaw. He assumed a heroic pose, and gave the cord a mighty tug.  
  
Nothing.  
  
Common sense put a quick lid on his little testosterone kick: it was brand new, ergo no gas. He sheepishly replaced it and continued along down the row. He remembered something from a little humor book about surviving a zombie attack or the end of the world or something like that. The first "rule": remember, you don't have to reload a blade. John quickly scanned the shelves... and there it was. A razor-sharp machete, two-foot blade... aww yeah.  
  
Despite the pain from his rib and his numerous cuts and scratches, he strode confidently out of the store. He reflected, with some amusement, on the fact that he had just looted a store. John had shoplifted only one thing in his entire life: a candy bar from a corner convenience store. He had been so guilt-ridden that he returned it six minutes and forty-three seconds later, sobbing. The kindly old man behind the counter praised him for his honesty and sent him home, and that was that. Nothing he had seen so far gave the impression of being a kindly old man, or any man for that matter. Just him and the beasts.  
  
As he bounced the machete in his hand and took a few practice slices, he decided he wouldn't have it any other way.  
  
************************************************************************  
  
John limped painfully forward as the monster behind him spasmed its last few pints of blood onto the pavement. His skin was red and peeling, and one of his eyes was swollen shut. His ankle was twisted, and he had a large knot on his head. John, like all young men, made mistakes, but only one had he paid the price for: overconfidence.  
  
Newly endowed with his machete, he had stridden out of the gardening store with a cocky, I-can-handle-anything attitude. He soon encountered a monster, the same kind that had sprayed him with some kind of acid near that rest stop bathroom a few hours ago, and decided to even the score. John ran up to the thing, and as soon as it leaned back to spray, he quickly sidestepped and buried his machete into where its neck should be. Now, normally, a machete to the neck would've severed arteries, airways, and filled the unlucky recipient with a death panic.  
  
John had forgotten that this was not a man.  
  
The machete was slightly deflected by the monster's latex-like skin, and so he ended up nearly slicing a fillet out of its neck and shoulder. He wasn't counting on some samurai-esque decapitation technique, but he was counting on getting the machete out of the flesh quickly. Unfortunately, it stuck, and while John desperately tried to yank his weapon free, the enraged demon turned to him, leaned back, and sprayed him point blank...  
  
Blinded and burning, he instinctively kicked, and due to some ridiculous luck, he managed to fell the monster his first blow. The straightened human knee requires less than eighty pounds per square inch to snap backwards—about the weight of a 10-year-old leaning on it. The monster was not human, but it had its legs straightened, and unlike The Glutton, this one did not defy physics or anatomy. Its knee turned with a sickening series of pops and cracks, and it promptly collapsed with a hideous scream of pain. John promptly stomped the thing until it stopped moving, and then stomped some more, until its head was roughly the thickness and texture of a hamburger patty.  
  
He was soaked with blood and sweat and ichor, and the rage flowing through him did not stop after killing this abomination. Though he had sprained his ankle on the demon's head, the thought of his brother here with these things, of his mother crying, of himself dying, and the pain flowing through his chemically burned skin combined to make him something like God's wrath manifest. He was lucky that he had these fueling him; the death screams of the wretch he had just wasted attracted more, and some different ones. There were at least six of them.  
  
He quickly dispatched two, tripping and cutting them in one swift motion before kicking with all his might. More came, and he faltered for a second. The fear threatened to overwhelm his consciousness, when he suddenly had a fleeting thought of books. Lots and lots of books. John was a voracious reader, and he spent a good deal of his time in his room reading. He no longer thought of the monsters staggering towards him: instead, he was lost in the vast library of his memory. Shakespeare, Thoreau, Patterson. Classics and poetry, novels and comic books, everything he had ever read in one huge monolithic bookcase, towering to the sky. As if on cue, a single, thin volume fell from about midway up; it landed with a finality that disturbed him. It did not bounce or flutter: it opened and stayed. Cautiously, he made his way forward. It looked like an old copy of Hagakure, a samurai treatise written by a man who had never seen a battle. Suddenly, the book seemed to swell, illuminating a single sentence in blood red. It was an old proverb:  
  
Step out from under the eaves and you're a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.  
  
John blinked in confusion, and suddenly the bookcase was gone, and the monsters were back. Then, he understood. He knew why he had been shown the proverb. Many had interpreted it as a literal instruction for daimyos and VIPs to stay within their castle walls, but John suddenly grappled with a new insight: it was not a warning against leaving safety, it was a warning against the "safety" itself. A man who lived in fear could never step more than five feet from the door, could never open the gates and live. Life. It's why he was here, wasn't it? For Josh's life, literally, and for his and his mother's.  
  
He snapped out of his reverie. The old feeling of wrath returned, this time unhindered by fear or doubt. John flew into the group of monsters, wildly flailing the machete, not caring for his body or sanity. He was hit several times by things that looked like deranged mannequins, bloodying his face and head, but it only served to infuriate him further. He ruthlessly hacked into them, past all feelings of pity, or mercy, or happiness or sadness or fear. Just his wrath remained.  
  
He sat down among the corpses. He was coated in a layer of dried blood, giving his skin a dull red sheen. He rocked back and forth, singing silently to himself. After a few minutes, he got up and staggered a few steps. An old air-raid klaxon siren wailed to the north, and his voice rose to meet it in a primeval scream.  
  
A bullet tore through his shoulder, spinning him to the ground, and he had a vision of black figures swarming towards him as he lapsed into unconsciousness. 


	4. Epilogue

(Excerpt from the Silent Hill Chronicle, April 12, 2004)  
  
Headline: Rampaging Teen Baffles Authorities, Family  
  
By: David S. Trujillo  
  
Early this morning, the Silent Hill Police Department apprehended John C. Manheim, an apparently insane young man of almost 18 years. He is facing charges of breaking and entering, theft, and murder, and is in the Intensive Care Unit at Brookhaven Hospital.  
  
John was reporting missing two days ago by Beatrice and Joshua Manheim, his only living relatives and immediate family. "We were worried sick," Beatrice stated. "John had been... different for days now. Before he left, he was ranting something about Josh missing, and a major lead."  
  
"Yeah," Joshua, 9, confirmed. "my big brother was losing it. He kept coming into my room, and looking at me like I was a ghost or something, and then he would pick up a random picture of, like, a dog or something, and he would look all disturbed. The night before he left, I remember he came in and picked up this paper that I use to test-mix colors, so it was basically a mass of scribbles, and then... he asked if this was dad... and... I asked him 'What do you mean?' and he looked like he was really scared, and then he ran out."  
  
Witnesses say that John stumbled into town on Wiltse Road, near Alinda's Flower Shop, and looked distressed. It is thought he entered through the old forest trail, and would explain the vandalism suffered by the First Methodist Church of Silent Hill. He ran to the flower shop (closed for the Easter holiday), smashed in the window, and emerged five minutes later with a machete.  
  
Ben Nathans, a local resident and eyewitness, offers a detailed account. "Yeah, man, he came runnin' in through the construction yard there, and hit that newspaper thing on Wiltse. He got up, ran and broke into the garden store an' came out with this big-a** knife thing. I got real scared and called the cops."  
  
Unfortunately, the SHPD could not respond in time: the young man ran headfirst into a startled group of tourists and began hacking away, yelling like a madman. After kicking and otherwise mauling the bodies, he sat down and "kinda rocked and sang, like you see them crazy people do in movies." As the patrol car pulled up, he then proceeded to start yelling, apparently to match the pitch of the siren. The officer attempted a neutralizing shot into his upper arm, but missed and hit him in the torso due to the youth's unpredictable movement.  
  
John C. Manheim was set to graduate in May in the top 10% of his class, and had been recently accepted by George Washington University. 


End file.
